updated 07:03 pm EDT, Thu March 20, 2014

17-hour disruption delayed launch of redesigned Starbucks app

Apple developers are still fuming over a prolonged outage of the company's iTunes Connect service, which started yesterday afternoon (5PM PT) and continued on until 10AM PT on Thursday. While not all developers were affected, a cascade of Twitter messages from frustrated app creators indicated that Apple's description of "some users" being affected was a not-insignificant percentage, and for some is still an ongoing problem.

While Apple reported the problem on its own system status page as starting around 5PM PT, other developers reported issues with iTunes Connect more than eight hours earlier in the day. The disruption caused a short delay for Starbucks, which had planned to release its revamped app for iPhone on Wednesday (and had announced such to the press) but had to delay the launch 24 hours, finally posting it around noon Eastern time. The downtime stopped both new app submissions as well as updates from going through.

Normally, the "processing" phase between developers approving a launch on iTunes Connect and the app actually showing up on iTunes is around 45 minutes to an hour. Even developers less affected by the problem noted that the "processing" phase appeared to go on for several hours, with some developers saying the problem is still going on. Apple has not yet commented on the nature of the issue or why there was such a prolonged outage.